Sunday, April 27, 2014

Book I Read: Never Go Back (Lee Child) & more

I've been inhaling books lately. I broke my nook(#*@#!), so I'm back on Physical books for the time
being. I love the smell of them but wow it's heavy to carry a week's
worth of books around an airport. Heavy, but delicious!

Ginseng Dreams (Kristin Johannsen)
- Intriguing book. This book makes me seriously consider acquiring a parcel of deeply remote woodland and seeding in Ginseng as a long term investment. I like the idea of camping off the grid for a week a year tending my plot, and Mathematically this looks like a decent investment. In honest self criticism I have to admit that my risk coefficient is a blatant uneducated guess. This needs more thought.

- Vigorous annoyance that book one of this Trilogy is in paperback, but the other two are still hardback.

- A memory erasing serum is an intriguing ethics problem. The Daniel Suarez book Influx touched on this too. What is it to steal a memory? To reduce a person to a blank slate? Is it murder? Is it almost?
- Regarding the statue, would a recirculating water system successfully erode rock? I understood the primary mechanism of water erosion to be chemical, not mechanical. Perhaps if another chemical was used to bring the calcium* ions out of solution and re-acidify the water?

* - Assuming the rock is limestone.

Right now I'm working through "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable". It's slow going. My brain is largely googlified, meaning I subconsciously skim and content filter non-fiction. A googly brain is a big plus when you need to find and extract specific data, but it's a serious PITA when you want to dig deep into a subject. Books like this and the Ginseng book take real effort to stick to. I am working on it.

This week I will be in Active Directory Security training. Assuming that does not drive me to complete exhaustion, I will be shopping for Flash Boys and Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Those should be interesting.